Mairead Case

T i n y

In Greek theatre, death almost always happened offstage. A messenger would run onstage and tell the audience about it. Next somebody would roll out a cart with a body slumped on top. A bloody little diorama. The body would be limp in a kitchen, or slung on top of sheep. All red, and pulsing at the neck if you looked closely enough. Sometimes a sequin would tremble. There is solemnity in looking at a body, and a false release. Because obviously these people didn’t actually die on little rolly carts. There are no flies, no muscle spasms. No gut-gas. The audience is not forced to watch the last breath, the moment the eyes dull, and this turns death into an object.

Fingernails and hair continue to grow after death. It sounds like vines. A final bloom.

Greeks didn’t use books to tell them about power and death and good and bad. They didn’t have the Qua’aran or the Old Testament, or zines. 

No photo albums with pressed lavender and their grandmother’s handwriting. No pictures of men, their faces frozen mid-chew, their hands holding ghostly guns and knives.

No, the Greeks talked about death in the theatre.

Everyone sat down together and looked.

They tried to see, together.

The Greeks understood theatre as a way of explaining what would probably have happened: in this world, under the law. Theatre was a grim deal. The gods were petty. They were reality television.

Looking is exhausting, especially when it doesn’t clarify anything. When we look at moments stacked up on each other, sometimes we see change, and sometimes a death. We must try to do this without colonizing the experience. We must forget temporarily forget our bodies so we can see others.

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Tiny and Izzy were neighbors before they were born. Their mothers drank lots of ginger tea while waiting to meet their kids. Tiny was born first, on the first day fall felt closer to winter than summer. She imagines her mother walking down the driveway to the car, yellow leaves circling like rags about to turn into a dress. Air like cold apples. Tiny doesn’t imagine her father there at all, and so he wasn’t. It is hard for some people to watch things that their bodies can’t do. They feel helpless.

            Izzy was born a month later, with so much hair her face seemed smaller than it actually was. Their mothers drank more tea together. They shared casseroles and tips for growing. Tiny and Izzy played together all the time. Eventually Tiny’s mom went back to work at the hospital. Sometimes Tiny and Izzy slept in the same bed. It was like they lived in the same house, except it was really two houses with a driveway in the middle.

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When they were old enough to be alone together, Tiny and Izzy played all day in the space in-between. They were short so the grass seemed tall. They played with sidewalk chalk and wooly bear caterpillars, and set out dandelions by the slugs’ beer dishes. They pretended to be color fairies, which means everything you say has to be about color somehow.     

            

            Once Izzy was blue and all she said was moon moooooon mooon. It is important to play pretend with people you love because then when disaster happens, you have other memories and options. You can say it will be okay, because you know it has been before. Trust helps focus.

Once Tiny and Izzy played pirates and women, only the neighbors looked out their windows and they didn’t understand. They called Izzy’s mother and said your child is tied to the telephone pole with jump rope. She is screaming. Later Izzy’s mother explained how some games need to be private, like when Tiny took her clothes off to read in the sunshine. It wasn’t bad, but it was a private thing. Tiny didn’t understand. If she was the only one playing, then wasn’t it already private?[1]

            Sometimes the world you build isn’t for anyone else. If people look, that’s their problem. They are not owed an explanation. Sometimes Tiny and Izzy spent weeks not really talking to anyone but each other. Their first step was always: pretend our mother is dead. Tiny’s mother really was, so like that they taught themselves to mourn.

[1]Tiny says, now: Sometimes I get home when Dad’s leaving for work. He thinks it means I’m wild, that I’ve been out all night swinging upside down from pipes in nightclubs but really, usually I’m coming straight from Izzy’s bed. If we stay late the buses aren’t running, and if we walk home we’re always cold. So we warm each other up. We don’t talk about it.

I like holding her—she’s shorter so her heels hit me mid-shin—and when 

I hold her I can tell when her breath changes. It lengthens, it moves from her chest to her throat. I think about her throat and see a bright, bright blue, like a door. That color and sound means she’s asleep. Once Izzy is asleep I can sleep too. She never has nightmares but sometimes I do.

It’s always the same: something terrible is about to happen to someone I love, and I am the only one who knows, and I try to save them but I can’t. 

I scream myself awake trying.

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Izzy says: When Tiny screams at night she sounds like an old lady.

Or an old man.

An old person.

Like someone who maybe hasn’t spoken for a while and now really, really needs to. She is always screaming a name. The name is never mine.

Once it was really bad, she woke up with fresh sweat and its smell mixed with the nighttime sweat and it streaked her makeup into layers, like a map of geologic plates. I said Tiny, it’s time to go back to sleep, and she said it’s not, it’s not.

I’m scared.

That’s how I knew she actually was sleepy, because Tiny is never afraid when she’s awake. Tiny, I said, give me your hand. And she did, and we laid on our backs side-by-side. We fell asleep like that.

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There is a war. It is happening far away from where Tiny and Izzy live, and so they don’t worry about bombs except inside their heads. In the streets, everything is the same. The lights go on at dusk every night, like they always have, and the candy bars at the drug store are the same. Tiny always chooses something with close to one ingredient. Nougat, or chocolate. Done. Izzy likes candy that comes in small pieces and tastes like neon fangs. She takes hours to eat it, one by one.

            Inside Tiny’s head her house is bombed almost every night. Usually the office where her dad works is hit first, and then the whole house curls mad red around it. She is pretty sure there are no sounds in these dreams, but when she remembers them in the morning she adds it, like rescuing a mismatched film. She smells the chemical char.

            Inside Izzy’s head she thinks about all the ways she could help people sick in the war. Izzy could knit mittens for the soldiers, or make them apple cake. Apple cake keeps well in pockets. Izzy is a good listener so she is good at helping. She helps people in the ways they ask to be helped, so she makes them stronger. Izzy helps Tiny this way a lot, which is one big reason why Tiny became so strong and then, after that, brave.

            The war is about oil. The far-away country has more than they could use in one hundred years, and so other countries are fighting to make them share. Tiny doesn’t know anything about specific weapons, or even what the country at war looks like. She wouldn’t know how to buy beans or eggs. She wouldn’t know where children play color like she did with Izzy. Men have told Tiny that asking these questions means she doesn’t understand war at all, but Tiny knows they’re wrong. They are so pressed for time that they forget the people.

            She remembers the day the war started. People were talking on all the televisions, with their jaws locked and tremors in their voices. People on the television are paid lots of money to keep calm, so when Tiny heard the anchors’ voices change she felt scared, like mud and hair turned suddenly into fulgurite. She wore her hoodie up all day long. She chewed its silver zipper until she almost cracked her tooth.

            Tiny already knew that a war in any country, but especially in a country that is far away from yours, and poorer than yours, means disaster everywhere. She looked at her friends’ faces and imagined them scarred. There are now weapons that shred skin. There are now weapons that drop viruses into bedrooms.

            The war is now five years old.

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Tiny’s friend Tim went to war. He came back with a metal foot and money for college.

Tiny’s friend Alex went to war. He came back with new cooking techniques, an extensive internet roleplaying community, and, automatically, a government job.

Tiny’s friend Anastasia went to war. She came back with a husband.

Tiny’s friend Frank went to war. He came back with burns on his face, and then he went to war again.

Pretty soon Tiny starts to see signs in coffeeshops and drugstores that define people by what they are not, or what they are. Are you a veteran. Are you religious. Are you a baby. Fixed binaries, nothing in-between. 

For one side to have power, the other side must not. After that, nothing is allowed to change, because then men will have to learn to understand it again. The phrase “both / and” frightens men.

When someone is already dead, and you look at them again and again, it is an obscenity.

War does this to people.

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Tiny’s brother went to war.

His name is Mike.

Say it, write it in fire. Tell it to the trees. MIKE.